


Dusk to Dawn

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gargoyles (Cartoon) Fusion, also probable prytter, also you don't even have to ask what the other probable ship is at this point, gargoyle/human relations, more characters to be tagged as they appear, probable eventual minlace, you just know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 03:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30082623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: A fusion with Gargoyles, with Wolf 359 characters roughly taking the place of canon Gargoyles characters, though not with any sort of 1-to-1 correspondence.
Kudos: 2





	Dusk to Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> me: I would like to finish one thing, ever, please, or at least write chapters on my already posted stuff.
> 
> my brain: flesh out some of the snippets of the not-yet-posted Gargoyles AU enough to post, gotcha.
> 
> Me: NO

They called her Goliath, and goliath she was: standing six and a half feet tall and far more than 200 pounds of solid muscle, even when her skin was not made of stone.

But all of her strength had not been enough to protect her clan.

And now they were three. Three left from a clan of hundreds, a warrior new to leading and two skinny scraps who looked barely out of the egg to her jaded eyes. Not enough. Not enough to hold this castle, and not enough to protect the eggs that waited to hatch in the caverns beneath. Their matriarch dead, shattered in the betrayal that had shattered their clan. And so Goliath was left to make decisions, when they had never been hers to make before.

She was fairly certain she was making the wrong ones. But there were no right decisions left.

She just had to trust that the princess was a woman of her word.

And she had to trust that her living charges would not recognize the Magus’s spell for the suicide that it was.

Perhaps there was hope. Perhaps the eggs of the clan would survive in the care of the humans. Perhaps some day, the hatchlings of the clan would return and find a way to wake Goliath and her two charges from the stone sleep they would be locked in. Perhaps their clan would live again.

But she thought that perhaps was too much to hope for.

And so, they slept, for a thousand years.

Alexander Hilbert picked up a fragment of stone from the parapet and frowned at it. He was still annoyed about being dragged to Scotland for this “fun little trip,” as Marcus Cutter had called it. In search of creatures that turned to stone in the day, but were living flesh at night. Nonsense. But here he was, on the parapet of a moldering and long-abandoned Scottish castle, in search of a child’s fairytale.

Oh, the rough fragments and chunks of stone that littered the parapet did have an unusual crystalline structure, and they did seem remarkably resistant to forms of damage other than being further broken apart—the three intact statues that they had found were tough enough that scraping their surfaces roughly only yielded a few grains of stone—but even when viewed under an electron microscope, at one of Goddard’s satellite labs, there was no sign of anything resembling DNA in them. Mr. Cutter would have been better served by bringing a geologist on this trip than a geneticist.

“Are we done? It is getting cold,” Alexander complained.

“Says the Russian.” Mr. Cutter rolled his eyes. “Give it time.”

The sun had been down for five minutes, and there had been no change to the stone statues. “They would have changed by now, would they not have?”

Before Mr Cutter could respond, a darting movement drew his eye, barely visible in the dusk that surrounded him. And there, another. Not one of the statues they had spent the past two days studying—they were as still solid stone—but whatever those movements were, they seemed to be coming from something about the same size—and perhaps the same shape? Alexander flashed his flashlight around, trying to catch a good look at one of them, but the one he had been following darted out of sight behind a parapet. “Mr. Cutter…”

“I saw,” the man said breathlessly.

“We should leave.”

Mr. Cutter shook his head. “No.” He took a step towards where the statues were perched on the parapet, to do what, Alexander didn’t know. Only suddenly, there was something—someone?—between them and the statues, winged and massive. Alexander turned his flashlight’s beam in that direction, revealing a roughly humanoid figure with wings—and was that a tail?—in a warrior’s stance, teeth bared and sharp-clawed fingers hooked and ready to rend flesh. The creature’s eyes were strange, glowing red as she—and he was fairly certain the creature was a she—snarled at Alexander and Marcus. And then, suddenly, the glow faded, revealing a vast and fathomless black beneath. She straightened up, folded that vast wingspan about her like a cloak, approached with her hand outstretched.

To Alexander’s surprise, Mr Cutter reached for her as well. “Oh strange new world, that has such people in it,” he murmured, an undertone of delight in his voice.

“You know my name,” the creature said in a voice that was not quite a growl.

“Miranda?”

“Yes.” And then her hand clasped around Mr. Cutter’s wrist, in what looked like a warrior’s greeting. “I have foreseen your coming. You will free my clan and return my castle to me.”

“Will I, now.” But rather than incredulous, Mr. Cutter still sounded delighted. Alexander rolled his eyes.

There was a small noise behind him, and Alexander glanced over his shoulder, only to let out a yelp of surprise. Another creature—shorter, but no less dangerous-looking—had managed to sneak up behind Alexander, and she was so close that he would have bumped into her if he had taken a single step back. “Do you mind?” he snapped irritably, forgetting for a moment that, as far as he knew, she was some sort of wild creature. The horns on her brow certainly looked dangerous, but the face beneath was round and good-humored and seemed to be laughing silently at him.

“Yes,” she said, baring her fangs.

A noise halfway between a cough and a stifled laugh came from behind Alexander’s other shoulder, and he whipped his head around to find that a third such creature had joined them. He and Mr. Cutter were definitely surrounded.

Or they would be, if Mr. Cutter had not wandered off down the parapet, arm in arm with the first creature they had encountered, apparently conferring seriously on some matter. Alexander tried to hold back a sigh of exasperation, but one escaped anyway.

“He really doesn’t have much in the way of a survival instinct, does he?” the shorter of the two creatures near Alexander said. She had her head tilted to one side as she watched Cutter and this Miranda, as they walked down the parapet.

“He is more dangerous than he appears.” The man had a taste for expensive and expansive cybernetic enhancement, and it made him a force to be reckoned with. Alexander had seen him stop an assassination attempt by the simple expedient of snatching the bullet out of the air.

There was a moment of silence from the creature. “Ah. I see,” she said, sounding faintly disgusted. “What kind of person does something like _that_ to themselves?”

“A man with more money than sense,” Alexander said. He winced. That had been too candid. But it was why he had fallen in with Cutter, after all. The man had shown interest in Alexander’s work with retroviruses, and Alexander had needed funding to continue his research. And in exchange, all he had to do was produce something Cutter found useful a few times a year, and put up with being dragged on the occasional trip to far-off locations in search of monsters.

Yes, it was a _very_ good deal.

He just hadn’t expected one of these trips to actually result in monsters.

He cast his eye over the two creatures who were still at his side. “And do the two of you have names as well?”

They exchanged a look. “Well, not traditionally,” the shorter one said. “But they’ve become useful.” She held one of her viciously clawed hands out to him—the left one, not the right—and then withdrew it when Alexander only stared dubiously at it. “I go by Rosemary.”

“For remembrance?” he asked without thinking, half-remembering the Shakespeare quote about the plant.

“You might also rue the day you ever met me,” she added with a sharp-toothed grin. “And my silent companion is Adriana.” The taller creature nodded a greeting, a brief, dignified tilt of her head.

He did not know his Shakespeare well enough to know whether she followed the same theme, but he supposed it didn’t matter. “And are we to expect more of your kind?”

The short gargoyle—Rosemary—seemed to shrink in on herself a little, those raised wings drooping, her ears flattening back against her skull. “Just us. And those three.” She gestured at the statues. “We’re all that’s left of Clan Wyvern.”

“But they are not—“

“They’re cursed,” she interjected.

Alexander let out a disbelieving snort of laughter. “Cursed.” That sounded like magic, something he definitely did _not_ believe in.

And Rosemary seemed to know it. “Believe in magic or not, Dmitri Vologin. That doesn’t make it any less real.”

The use of his birth name by this creature—a name he hadn’t used for nearly twenty years, a name she could not possibly know—sent a shock through his system. “What—how—“

She held up one of those fiercely clawed fingers. “I Saw it in your past,” she said simply. “Why do you think I named myself for remembrance?”

And she had read his mind, too, he realized. To know that he did not believe in magic, to respond to him as if he had spoken that thought out loud... what sort of beings _were_ these gargoyles?

He looked forward to finding out.


End file.
